Tracking 90% of Senate Dems (40) took Abramoff cash talking point

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Thursday February 16, 2006 · 6:27 PM PST

2006/02/16 · 18:27

Letters to the Editor always have and always will be used to push talking points that are unable to make it in to actual news stories. Since local papers seldom put letters online, it is difficult to see how such ideas are spreading, allowing memes to move under the rader.

Have you read a letter stating that 40 Senate Democrats (90%) took Abramoff money? Because this is a talking point in Montana. The Missoula Independent shows how this is moving from the RNC and NRCC into local papers with the state GOP trying to push it further:

Earlier this week the Montana GOP circulated a letter to the editor that had already appeared in the Helena Independent Record, authored by Chuck Baraby, of Helena, claiming that "Most Senate Democrats, 90 percent, took Abramoff-related cash." The idea was that the media has falsely cast the Abramoff scandal as a Republican affair, while Democrats were taking the felon's money as well.
Chuck Denowh, executive director of the Montana Republican Party forwarded Baraby's letter to newspapers across the state Monday urging editors to reprint it. The letter lists 40 Senate Democrats along with the supposed amounts of "Abramoff-related" monies they received. [...]
Denowh told the Independent he made no effort to verify the facts laid out in Baraby's letter before circulating it.
"I assumed that if the Helena Independent Record had printed it, that was good enough for me," Denowh said Tuesday.

Once they get it in one paper, then they use that to push it elsewhere. Follow the talking point...

Baraby says he got his information from a Jan. 6 article on NewsMax.com, a conservative news website. That article cited the Republican National Committee as the source of the information.
Various Internet blogs, meanwhile, cite a website run by Dwight L. Morris & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in campaign finance research, as the source. But when contacted, Morris refused to stand behind the widely-circulating report. Morris said his firm makes campaign finance data available, and the firm's clients use it to "grind their own axes."
In this case, he said, the client was the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
"I have no idea if the numbers are 100 percent accurate or not," Morris said from his Virginia office. "I don't know what `Abramoff-linked' means."

Any other sightings? [updated] I added the word 'tracking' to the title following a recommendation in the comments. Also, John S. Adams deserves props for taking the time to realize the story behind the story the local GOP was trying to get him to write. Finally, the Independent's George Ochenski is a great read, even if he is a lobbyist.

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